Neither of these had come from Mike’s shotgun.
Keith had probably been wandering around the house in shock, his hair and clothes saturated with his own blood as well as that of his wife. At least he’d had the presence of mind to put a bullet into her.
By the sound of his breathing, by the shallow sobs that came between each exhalation, Rudy surmised Mike was having trouble finding a pulse. He could see for himself that Keith’s chest was no longer rising and falling.
“Mike,” he began, his finger curled tautly around the trigger, “I think perhaps you should—”
Back away from him, Rudy had meant to say, but Keith’s eyes were suddenly open, burning with the faint phosphorescence of Wormwood, and the words turned to dust on his tongue. Mike froze, a sharp gasp punctuating his surprise as Keith’s head darted up, quick as a cobra. Two of Mike Dawley’s fingers disappeared in a heartbeat, tumbling down the open gullet of his neighbor’s throat like mackerel down a shark. There was an impatient attempt at chewing, a vicious gnashing of incisors, then the fingers were gone.
Mike screamed, holding up his bloody hand as if it were on fire, capable of engulfing him.
A part of Rudy seemed to step back from his own body and gaze down from the vantage of a casual observer, a disinterested witness in a world that had slowed almost to a stop. He watched coolly as the more solid, practical part of him stepped forward, thrust the muzzle of the rifle against Keith’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. A nearly bloodless hole appeared, tunneling down through the decaying corridors of Keith’s brain.
Keith’s red and feverish eyes looked up and Rudy jerked the trigger again, unaware that he too was screaming.
There was a moment of uncertainty, a sputtering of half-severed connections, then Keith lay still, the Wormwood fading from his pupils.
“Jesus, Jesus…” Mike repeated, trembling as he clutched his bleeding hand to his chest.
Rudy glanced at him and the two split parts of him clicked jarringly back together. Time resumed its normal cadence and he fell to his knees, breathless.
In the halflight, Mike wept for his two lost fingers, still wriggling in Keith’s coiled guts.
Rudy wept for the hours and days stretched languidly ahead, for darkness without the hope or promise of a dawn.
26
As twilight gathered in the easterly corners of the sky, they touched matches and disposable lighters to the wadded balls of newspaper and the pyre began to burn. Slowly at first, as the flames worked inward, then eagerly as the lines joined hands and the dry braces of kindling took hold.
The flesh was the last thing to catch fire, and when it did a sickening smell rose in greasy billows over Quail Street, wafting through the treetops as the breeze carried it in a leisurely and northwesterly direction. Fat crackled and snapped like pine pitch, hair smoldered and jackstraw bones shifted beneath the weight of the seasoned cordwood. Skulls glowed and grimaced from deep inside the oven.
Brian Hanna, Keith and Naomi Sturling, Bud and Helen Iverson, and the Navaro family in their grim entirety.
The four scarecrows who came to rob them, cut down from their poles and burned with their appellations, their time of usefulness passed; gone with the coming of Wormwood; lost on the illiterate dead.
Fourteen bodies in all.
And eleven left to watch them burn.
27
Night fell over the land and the pyre continued to smolder as the wood and bodies gave way to tar and asphalt underneath.
Rudy looked beyond the flames to the three houses standing unoccupied at the far end of the street. As they’d searched through them earlier, they made certain to close the doors and windows once the valuables had been salvaged: the guns and ammunition, the food and bottled water, the candles and batteries.
Yet there was something unsettling about empty houses that had the power to stare back at you.
Houses that haunted you with their stale rooms and drying bloodstains, with the memory of things you’d seen and done inside.
So they’d drawn the curtains and locked the doors to better keep those terrible secrets inside.
Rudy shuffled his feet and looked behind him. The women had gone inside, having little stomach to watch the pyre burn to its bitter end, and Mike had retired as well, his hand inflamed, swollen so badly after his wife had stitched it shut that he’d had to swallow a few Codeine tablets from their medical stores just to keep from passing out from the pain.
Rudy looked at the Dawley house and wondered if he was sleeping.
He wondered if sleep were possible.
One day in town and Wormwood had already gobbled up half the street. Three out of six houses.
Would its appetite be as healthy tomorrow? Would it be content to wait that long?
He looked at Larry and Shane; aside from himself, the last two holdouts.
Larry had emerged from his house after the tragic death of his son, his anger and denial gone, turned to a sluggish brand of defeat. He had hardly spoken a word, hardly taken his eyes off the pyre all evening, as if he knew just where his son lay inside. Rudy felt sorry for him but wondered how much help he’d be once the next crisis came. He seemed to have given up the fight, and even by firelight his face looked haggard and gray, as if pieces of him were already dying.
Shane, on the other hand, seemed to be emerging from his shell. He too seemed to have aged, but in a positive way, from adolescence into adulthood, as if his life before Wormwood had only been a prologue. Over the last two weeks, his mettle had been tested and he’d come out the stronger for it; less uncertain of himself.
And what about me? Rudy wondered. How have I changed?
Ah, that was much more difficult to say. He was certain there had been changes, as marked as those which had reshaped the others, but he found his perspective wasn’t as clear. He felt like the same man he’d been a day, a month, even a year ago, but he sensed that this was untrue. You couldn’t fight for your life, for the lives of your family and neighbors, without changing. Not after killing a man, after witnessing people around you die vivid, horrible deaths… after pointing a rifle at a 6-month-old and telling yourself you were doing the right thing in pulling the trigger.
The stress fractures were no doubt there, but they were still too small to be seen.
He found himself shivering despite the heat.
What was the point even considering it? Whatever he and the others were tonight would be reshaped tomorrow. Then again the next day, and the next…
Ultimately, their destiny was one and the same as the ashes in the fire. It was only a question of putting it off a little longer — a day, an hour; perhaps only another fleeting moment.
Long enough to find some sense or reason to make it worth the living.
Or worth the letting go.
28
Pam Dawley knocked softly on the bedroom door and then quietly entered. She didn’t want to disturb her husband if he was sleeping, but needed to check the stitches she’d sewn into the ends of his fingers to make sure they weren’t bleeding or infected. As soon as she cracked the door, however, she knew that she had worries about the latter, because there was really no mistaking the smell. Even working in a hospital, she’d never gotten used to it; that dank and swampy smell, as close as a body could get to rotting without actually dying. It hung like a dark green mist about the room, unable to escape with the plywood over the window and the air conditioning gone.
She closed the door behind her, not wanting it to seep into other parts of the house, and pointed her flashlight at the foot of the bed. Mike seemed to react unfavorably to its touch, moaning aloud and struggling against the damp press of the sheet.
She turned the beam away and the shadows lengthened, they moved to the far corner behind the hamper and trembled as if they too wanted out. Mike sat up in bed with a violent start, his eyes wide, straining against the light, and Pam let out a short, fluttering scream, her free hand flying to smother it back inside her mouth.
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“Who is that?” he gasped, squinting across the room, his bandaged hand reaching for the loaded pistol he’d insisted she leave on the nightstand. Now it looked like he would shoot her with it. The gun, however, slid away and tumbled to the floor as he tried to pick it up, unaccustomed to the alterations that had been done to his hand; half his middle finger and three-quarters of the ring finger next to it now gone.
“It’s me!” she cried, turning the flashlight on herself, momentarily blinded by the beam. “It’s Pam, your wife!”
“Christ,” he sighed, letting the gun lie where it had fallen and rolling back against the pillow, his hair soaked with sweat. He raised his hands to cover his face, flinched when the stained dressings touched his skin, and closed his eyes against the grim reminder. Shaking his head and wishing it away.
For a long moment, Pam wondered if he’d forgotten she was there, and then his eyes opened slowly on the darkened room.
“I came to check your stitches,” she said, approaching the bed with a guarded step, as if he might have more guns secreted away. “How are you feeling?”
“Like something chewed me up and spat me back out,” he groaned, gazing at the empty air where his two fingers used to be. “I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his arm to the mattress, taking a long, rattling breath. “What time is it?”
“A little after nine,” she replied, leaving the flashlight atop the nightstand and turning toward the dresser. Half a dozen fat, scented candles sat atop it; candles she used to light before they made love. She struck a match and lit one. The delicate fragrance of sandalwood struggled briefly against the iron stench of infection, then turned sour and wilted.
She carried the candle back to the bed and set it on the nightstand. “You’ve been sleeping almost four hours.”
“Sleeping,” he echoed, a bitter smile touching his flushed face. “I’ve been dreaming… if that’s the word for it.”
“Nightmares?” She touched his brow and took her hand quickly away, as if burned. “You’ve got a fever.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said, then smiled again, his head sunk deeply into the pillow. “Don’t worry; I don’t think it’s contagious yet.”
She looked into his eyes and then looked away, opening the drawer in the nightstand and reaching for the thermometer she’d left there with the gauze and the medical tape. “You’ll need some antibiotics.”
His smile remained: a grim line carved against the pillow. “Hope we have some.”
She put the thermometer under his tongue and told him not to talk.
“Now,” she said, moving the candle closer, “let me see your hand.”
He gave her his good one, gripping her as if he might not let go.
“The other one,” she chided gently.
He watched her face as she unwrapped the bandages.
It told him everything he needed to know.
29
“What’s my temperature?” he asked as she shook it away, the old-fashioned glass and mercury tube going back into the drawer.
“102.4°,” she lied. It had been over 104°.
He gritted his teeth and swore at her as she daubed his stitches with disinfectant and carefully redressed them.
“Where’s Shane?” he asked when she’d finished.
“Out at the fire with Rudy and Larry,” she told him.
Mike let his head roll back and gazed at the ceiling. “He’s a good boy,” he sighed. “I was proud of him today.” He glanced at her. “You’ll tell him that, won’t you?”
“You can tell him yourself in the morning.”
He nodded, but weakly, as if far from convinced.
Pam rose from his side and looked down at him, the worry a calcified lump in her throat. “I’m going to get you some Erythromycin; and some Tylenol to knock that fever back.”
“Okay.”
She lingered by the bedside, as if she still had something to say. It was large, he saw, even through the fever; something that was going to hurt her coming out. Her mouth twisted slightly and there were suddenly tears in her eyes, a deep and regretful well of them.
She sat back down and took his hand; the good one this time. She closed her eyes and the bed started to tremble.
“What?” he whispered, all at once afraid.
“Oh Michael,” she sobbed, clutching his hand between her breasts, “I’m so sorry for the way I treated you! I never should have listened to that foolish woman! That bitch Sally Kellerman!” She opened her eyes. “But when she told me about that girl I thought, I thought I’d already lost you! I got so scared that something inside of me went a little crazy and I just wanted to hurt you! More than anything I wanted to take Shane away and make you feel as bad as I did!”
“Shhhh,” he told her, reaching up to touch her face, to brush away a long tear and a lock of hair that had fallen over her eye. “You don’t have to do this,” he said gently. “You know that nothing happened. Tabitha Kilbey had a lot of deep and serious problems in her life; that’s why she came to me. You also know that sometimes clients develop crushes and dependencies on their therapists. It happened before with Marjorie Kincade.”
She sniffed, a helpless laugh hiccoughing out of her. “Marjorie was forty-five years old and over two hundred pounds; she wasn’t anything like Tabitha Kilbey.”
“No, he agreed, “but it’s the same principle.”
She nodded. “It took me a long time to realize that, and I caused an awful lot of misery in the meantime. I drove you out of the house and denied Shane his father.”
He smiled. “I had faith you’d come around,” he said hoarsely.
“But all that time we lost…” she lamented. “Those are five months we’ll never get back again, and I want them back! I hate myself for throwing them away like I did, especially how things have turned out. I couldn’t bear to lose you now!”
“You’re not going to lose me; at least no more than a couple fingers worth.” He grinned and took her in his arms, holding his injured hand away from her, as if it might infect her through the dressing. “This is right where I’m supposed to be.”
Embracing him, she felt the full heat of his fever and remembered the pills.
And how few there actually were.
30
In the kitchen, she counted them out in the palm of her hand.
Damn. Only eight; not even half enough, and they were almost two years old.
I won’t lose him like this, she thought stubbornly. I won’t.
She set one of the capsules on the counter and tipped the rest back into the bottle.
WILLIAM IVERSON TAKE 2 CAPSULES DAILY WITH FOOD OR MILK
AVOID DIRECT SUNLIGHT TAKE UNTIL COMPLETED
Her eyes glanced down the prescription label. She got to the end and realized she’d known the doctor who’d written it. He used to make rounds at the hospital in addition to his private practice; until he’d developed colon cancer and passed away last fall.
It was a strange world, wasn’t it?
She put the bottle away in the cupboard and silently thanked Bud for ignoring the directions.
It bought her some time.
Not much, but maybe enough.
31
She brought him the antibiotics with a couple of Tylenol, made him swallow them down with a glass of water, then tried to get him to eat some applesauce, a few spoonfuls; enough for the drugs to stick to on the way down. That done, she went to the bathroom and ran cold water out of the faucet, soaking a small towel and a washcloth and laying them over his bare chest and brow. He complained a little about that, but left them alone.
She sat with him until he fell asleep, thinking of what she might do to save him.
And when she’d decided, she slipped out of the room to find her son.
32
Shane shook his head vehemently, not even waiting for her to finish. “You’re not going!” he exclaimed, eyes smoldering, his voice raised to drown out her protests. “I said forget it! If anyone goes
it ought to be me! You need to stay here and take care of him!”
Pam appealed to Rudy, who was standing further back, half-eaten by shadow. “Talk to him!” she implored, her expression underscored by firelight. “Make him see the sense of it!”
“I would,” Rudy answered, “but I’m afraid I agree with him. If anyone goes to town, it ought to be Shane. I don’t condone it, but he’s better qualified than you, and your skills are better used here.”
“But he’s just a baby!” she cried, horrified.
“Mom,” Shane murmured, flashing her a warning look. “I’m sixteen years old! I’m not a baby!”
“If I may, Shane?” Rudy interjected, turning to the boy’s mother. “What you’re proposing, Pam, is something akin to combat. The army recruits boys Shane’s age for such purposes. Boys who are quick and strong. They do not, as a rule, recruit 35-year-old women, however admirable their courage or nursing skills.”
“Now just a minute,” Pam objected, two red spots flaring high on her cheeks.
“Oh come on, Mom” Shane said, cutting her off. “He’s right and you know it! I can drive there and back in fifteen minutes!”
Here, Rudy interrupted. “You may have been able to do that in the past, Shane, but it won’t be so easy now; not nearly so easy. The nearest pharmacy, as your mother pointed out, is the Walgreen’s on Hudson Street. That’s in a good-sized shopping center off a busy arterial. I doubt very much if you’ll be able to drive up and dash inside. The roads, once you get to the bottom of the hill, are likely to be filled with obstacles, completely impassable in places.”
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